[ZeroGravitas]

I don't immediately see the issue either.

Though, even if I could, this is a new way to preprocess an image before feeding it into an encoder, and the examples have both been fed through the new downsizer, then the standard encoder, presumably at the standard Netflix bitrates and then (I think) upscaled back to the original size.

So if this didn't look a little compressed then that would be a methodological mistake, as you don't use downscaled encoding unless you've already decided that a full size encode has too much quality for your task.

And Netflix generally has incentives set up to reduce quality until their customers notice. That's why they quote stats based on that.

In web dev terms it's like reducing the size of your product images until it hurts sales. You're almost guaranteed to have artifacts visible to image compression experts before you hit the point that it affects your bottom line. If you are targeting customers on slow internet (and again if you are downscaling then you basically are) your sales are likely to initially rise as you get usable pictures to people faster.